When Women Attack

Beware of the vagina dentata.

An ancient fear is slouching from the past to stalk us: the figure of the woman who will screw you to death. She comes clothed in the latest, slickest fashions. In Under the Skin, a somber, hypnotically terrifying film out later this year, the Sexiest Woman Alive cruises through Scotland in a white van, picking up affectless young men, bringing them home, taking off all her clothes, and leading them into a kind of black goo that suspends and preserves them until their insides can be sucked out, leaving their skins to float like used candy wrappers in the ether. There is no explanation and no narration. None is needed: She is pure sexuality and she is pure killing. The two go together.

The vagina dentata, the vagina with teeth, is returning in an ever clearer and more recognizable form. From the beginning of the horror-movie genre, female sexuality as a force of immense, murderous power has been used to terrify audiences. But it used to be hidden. Psycho, the greatest of all horror movies, seems to be about a creepy man in a motel, but it is the spirit of his mother who insists Norman kill; in the end he is psychologically consumed by her personality. In Jaws, men in a boat are chased by a big pink mouth. The final scene is a pole collapsing into the sea. Draw your own conclusions about what fear it expresses. Alien was famously Jaws in space—spawning a whole franchise about the ferocious, superhuman intensity of motherly rage: The center of the horror in Aliens is literally a giant womb. And Carrie, Stephen King's first and often remade masterpiece, is about a girl who reaches puberty and massacres her whole high school as a result. Note that these are not just a bunch of scary movies; these are the scariest movies ever made.

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The woman whose sexuality kills men is one of the oldest figures of terror. It appears in myths all over the world, from South American tribes to China. Everywhere there are vaginas, there are stories about how they can kill you. The very first was the story of Ishtar from The Epic of Gilgamesh—the goddess of pure sex who uses her power to enslave animals and men. She loved the lion and "dug for him seven pits and seven." She bridled horses. She turned the shepherd into a wolf (the first instance of a werewolf in literature). Better known than Ishtar is the Greek figure Medusa, a great beauty with serpents for hair, the sight of whose face turns men to stone. The great French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous saw a fundamental expression of the fear of women in power in the figure of the Medusa: "Men say that there are two unrepresentable things: death and the feminine sex. That's because they need femininity to be associated with death; it's the jitters that gives them a hard-on! for themselves!" For four thousand years, the killer woman has been just that—a fusion of titillation and terror, the erotic and the deadly.

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Nothing reveals the profundity of the transformation of the lives between men and women more clearly than the fact that female sexual imagery, which is literally as old as civilization, is being totally reconstituted. For one thing, the vagina dentata today is much more explicit than earlier examples. The most direct predecessor of Under the Skin is Jennifer's Body, Diablo Cody's seriously underrated film about a high school cheerleader who consumes the men she seduces. The 2007 movie Teeth was about a woman who literally had teeth in her vagina. Dangerous women are also much more popular than they have ever been. Books and movies and television shows about witchcraft have begun to dominate the supernatural market. There's Witches of East End, The Originals, Sleepy Hollow, and American Horror Story: Coven, whose lead character has the ability—you guessed it—to screw men to death. She can't tell whether it's a gift or a curse.

Here's the main difference between the new versions of the vagina dentata and the old: The old stuff was created for men by men to express their fear of women; the new books and movies about powerful, magical, scary women are overwhelmingly made by women for women. Once upon a time, there was an idea that when women held power, we would live in a better world, an idea perhaps best expressed by Hiroshima survivor Tsutomu Yamaguchi when he advocated the idea that the only people who should run countries are breast-feeding mothers. We have too much experience to believe such cuteness anymore. Look at Lynndie England. But the new scary women are also the protagonists of their shows, reflecting a general darkening of sympathy—women as much as men are just trying to survive in a corrupt world, and the only way to do so is through activities that used to be called evil, and they want to see that reality reflected in what they watch. Television has been consumed with male antiheroes lately. Now it is women's turn.

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Men for these antiheroines are principally disposable sexual consumables. The young Scottish boys who are picked up by Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin seem to possess agency only vaguely. Once she invites them into her van, once she picks them, they are doomed. Who is going to turn down the invitation of her naked body? The movie offers only one exception, one survivor, a man whose face is elaborately deformed. He is the only man she lets escape, though again without any explanation. Perhaps he isn't tasty. Perhaps he is too different. Or perhaps she sympathizes with him. After all, he, too, is a monster of a kind.